[extropy-chat] AAAS conference on retrocausation

[Damien Broderick]

At 11:02 AM 6/26/2006 -0700, Stuart wrote:

> > (2) John Cramer of TI fame now thinks there
> > might be retro-causal effects, however brief.
>
>Hmmm. I do think there may be something to reverse
>causation. Some possible future timelines are more
>imminent than others and draw events toward them.

Cramer's claim was very much more specific than that. He develops a 
gedanken based on a recent QT experiment (Dopfer's PhD thesis), 
claiming that one should expect to see a certain effect 50 
microseconds prior to its cause. Moreover, he finds this consistent 
with the transactional interpretation. I still can't understand how 
this compatibility is possible, given that the transactional 
interpretation proposes that a rather mysterious retarded offer wave 
at T1 provokes an answering and no less mysterious advanced wave at 
T2 (from the effect), which reaches back in time to T1, and the 
handshake outcome is the observed retarded wave at T1 (the cause of 
the event at T2).

A physicist friend pointed out to me that Cramer's interpretation is 
perhaps less plausible than Bohm's quantum potential, where the 
photon 'senses' the environment nonlocally. For all I know, she might 
be right. :)

Damien Broderick